Tag: Best Practices

Story Maps are very popular; you can view story maps created by Esri and story maps created by the user community at the Storytelling with Maps website. By implementing a few best practices you can create a great user experience, and provide … Continue reading →

Want to make a beautiful pop-up to match your map or website? With a little elbow grease, CSS, and a keen eye for design, it’s easy. Here’s how you can skin the ArcGIS API for JavaScript pop-up widget. The pop-up … Continue reading →

If you missed the meeting, be sure to attend our next Team Water/Wastewater meeting in February. Registration is FREE and it’s a great way to stay in the loop or as a forum to showcase your own work and solutions with GIS and Water Utilities. If you would like to be on the meeting invite list, contact Christa Campbell at ccampbell@esri.com.

Be sure to check back for dates and location of our February meeting.

Also, save the date for next year’s meeting in San Diego: July 6, 2013.

At the 2012 Esri Education GIS Conference and the 2012 Esri International User Conference, we demonstrated how you can build informative thematic maps using the ArcGIS System. The purpose of the sessions was to take relatively simple datasets and create a range of alternative thematic map types that told a story in different ways. This demonstrated the techniques for creating the maps using ArcGIS for Desktop as our authoring environment and ArcGIS Online as our publishing mechanism. As the XXX Olympiad is currently taking place in London, UK we illustrated how alternative maps can be made to tell different stories of the relative success of nations over the period since the first Olympic games in 1896. Continue reading →

To build on the success of recent Developer Summit in California, we’ve decided to take the event on the road. Esri will be hosting 3 Dev Summits in Europe this September.

I hope developers from all over Europe and the world will come together in Rotterdam, Berlin or London (all 3 if you want). The technical sessions will focus on becoming more effective at building web, mobile and desktop applications. Senior Esri development staff will be presenting so you’ll get a chance to see what’s coming next. Registration information will be available soon but mark your calendar now and plan to join us in Europe.

Spatial datasets often have large numbers of features. Furthermore, these datasets may also contain individual features such as road casings that are very large and complex.

As a result of such large datasets, massive amounts of feature overlap (number of features and complexity of the overlapping features) within feature classes can result in a geoprocessing tool failure or poor performance. These failures are often due to system resources limitations, mismanagement of resources, “bad” data, or massive overlap in an area that cannot be processed within the available resources. Failure messages such as “Invalid Topology [4GB_FILE_LIMIT] “, or “Out of memory” can occur. In rare cases, an application crash is possible.

At 10.1, significant work has been done for managing the processing of large complex data. We have removed internal limitations and overhauled our overlay engine’s memory management. Some overlay processes that previously failed can now complete successfully, and with reasonable performance. However, following these guidelines and best practices should ensure your large overlay processes complete successfully.

We all have favorite maps that we think are great, but rather than just saying a map looks great, how many of us are able to take a critical look at it, evaluate it, and explain why it looks great? Having the ability to reflect on and evaluate maps as information products is important to understanding effective cartographic design so you can optimize communication of the intended message in your own maps as well as be able to understand why other maps work. In this blog entry, we’ll briefly look at some static maps and a web map to see what we think makes them great and then show you how using a checklist gives you the tools to reflect on maps in the same way. Continue reading →

When you create an intelligent web map or map service, you are sharing something that you hope will stand on its own and be useful to others. How can you deliver a map that is both attractive and useful for … Continue reading →

You might have noticed the new Select tool in the map tool palette. What in the world is this? How is it going to be useful to me? What else can I do after bringing in a web map from ArcGIS Online? Continue reading to find out more…

As discussed in a previous blog post, you can bring in the maps created in ArcGIS Online into Business Analyst Online and make the maps more meaningful. With the help of this new Select tool, you can make it even more powerful. Here’s how… Continue reading →

ArcGIS 10 introduced the concept of editing with feature templates, which define a new feature’s symbology and default attribute values, among other properties. Anytime I want to add a feature, I use the Create Features window, which displays a list of available feature templates and tools for creating new features.

Sometimes, though, I do not see the template I want to use in the Create Features window. This could be because there are no templates for the layer, but it could also be that the template exists but is being filtered out of the Create Features window. The underlying philosophy for determining whether ArcMap shows a feature template is that new features created with the template must be visible after creation. Therefore, templates are hidden whenever new features would immediately disappear and not be displayed on the map.

While a layer being turned off is one of the more obvious reasons why feature templates are not shown on the Create Features window, layer definition queries can be subtle causes. A definition query displays only the subset of features that match an attribute query defined on the Layer Properties dialog box; the remaining features are not drawn on the map or shown in the attributes table.

This post provides an overview of and best practices for the use of definition queries while creating features.